This article suggests sentinel node dissection is unnecessary??

swg

I dont' have a medical background, so I'm a bit confused..but I just found info about a study done to track exactly HOW breast cancer spreads.

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2018-02-breast-canc...

What concerned me was THIS paragraph:

"Our most important finding, however, was that the metastases in the axillary lymph nodes do not seem to spread further to other organs, so even if these metastases can show how aggressive the cancer is, it is not they that cause the spread," says Johan Hartman, Associate Professor at Karolinska Institutet's Department of Oncology-Pathology and one of the researchers who led the study."

So..wouldn't this suggest that all the cutting into our lymph nodes that our surgeons do..is USELESS?

And those of us with clear lymph nodes..it really doesn't mean we can take comfort that the cancer hasn't spread?

Jelson

I would interpret it as saying removal of axillary lymph nodes is useless as a treatment, valuable perhaps to indicate how aggressive the cancer is -though I thought that was done through study of the cancer cells - leading to a grade 1, 2 or 3). I am not sure what this means for sentinal node biopsy - whether removal of any lymph nodes, including the sentinal nodes makes a difference.

SummerAngel

It was my understanding that sentinel node biopsy was for staging purposes.

gb2115

So if it's not through the axillary nodes that a metastatic spread happens, where IS it spreading from? The intramammary nodes?

swg

See, that's where my lack of any real medical knowledge fails me. Maybe some of the people on here who have more of a medical background could chime in.

Egads007

I have a hard time wrapping my head around this, and do hope someone with medical know how chimes in too! At this point my thinking is that cancer cells are crafty little bastards and don’t want them left anywhere in my body! I gladly gave up my 2 sentinels...peace of mind

Meg101

BUMP

besa

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/03/1803...

This is a cut and paste of someone else's post. I think there is no consensus on this topic - just published conflicting results and theories. Hopefully eventually a consensus will be reached.

Just because something is published in a peer reviewed scientific journal (even a prestigious journal wirh a high impact factor) does not make the conclusions valid. They are just the results and conclusions that were obtained at the time by one group of scientists or physicians.

Older thread on this topic below:

https://community.breastcancer.org/forum/73/topics...

To answer one of the original posters questions, unfortunately woman who are node negative can still end up with metastatic disease. There may be stray cancer cells that have spread. That is why women with who are ER positive and node negative (with invasive bc) are offered tamoxifen or an aromatase inhibitor. These drugs help cut down the chance of metastatic disease.

NotVeryBrave

I think that maybe one of the reasons that the sentinel nodes are taken is because lymph nodes act as a filter and cancer cells can be collected from them. It doesn't guarantee that if they are found there that they are also elsewhere in the body. Conversely - cancer cells can also travel through the blood to distant sites, but there is no method for detection in that case.

So - it seems that checking the sentinel nodes gives information about potential spread, but it wouldn't be limited to the lymph system.